Once a Noble Endeavor
Page 30
One foot behind the potential killer, Joann picked her target and drew back her long, powerful legs to her chest and kicked forward with all her strength into Clinton’s lower back, hitting his kidneys just as Nick threw the lamp at his face. Their timing was good. The lamp exploded in a barrage of broken glass and a loud moan slipped through Clinton’s lips.
Stunned with pain exploding from his lower back, bleeding from the forehead and the wind knocked out of him, the gun flew from the felon’s hands once more, landing ten feet away on the saddle of the open doorway. Now unarmed yet still determined to kill, Clinton awkwardly charged towards Nicky. Pinning him against the stairway, he pushed Nick’s weary arms apart and grabbed his throat.
Clinton, with his fingers and palms firmly around Nicky’s neck, began lifting Brennan off the floor and viciously pulling him around the room. The ex-con began choking Nick using all his strength, now concentrated in his huge, powerful hands. Brennan began to feel his windpipe closing. Unable to inflate his lungs, slowly Nicky was losing consciousness, his ears began to ring and his vision became foggy, blurred and distorted. Slowly fading away, Nick’s arms began to shake and fall to his side.
Suddenly, the thunder of four thunderous gun shots rang out, shaking the walls within the disheveled room. Bangbangbangbang! Clinton’s mouth dropped open in a perverse expressionless motion and he stood still upright with his huge muscular arms now falling to his side, staring at Nick for two full seconds. Slowly, he fell forward, stood up again, then fell back and hit the floor head first with a loud crash. He rolled over to his right side and with his eyes dilated and fixed open gave out a long sigh. The son of a bitch is dead, Nick slowly realized as he began to recover and breathe normally.
Standing, his left shoulder drooping, covered with dried blood, and a smoking gun aimed high in his right hand, there at the threshold of the front door, shaking and barely breathing, was Tom DeBoer. White and black police cruisers with darkened headlights, silently and recklessly sliding in all directions, began to fill the area outside the front doorway behind DeBoer. Guns drawn, the cops jumped from their patrol vehicles and the high-pitched command “Drop the gun, don’t move!” came out of the shadowed darkness. Tom dropped the gun, raised both hands and stumbled toward Nick, and collapsing like a puppet on strings, sat down cross-legged on the floor.
As Great Barrington officers poured in and filled the living room, Joann sat breathless and silent. Then she looked at the nearest cop and said, “Where is my daughter, Elizabeth, the little blonde girl?”
“She’s fine, ma’am. She waved us down from the bushes at the head of the driveway. We have her in a parked patrol car with an officer on Route 23.”
Still feeling faint, Nick looked down at Tom. “Thanks, Tommy, you did great. You okay?”
“I think I could use a few pints of blood, otherwise I’m doing fine.”
“An ambulance is en route,” an officer said as he placed a bandage on Tom’s brown, crusty wounds.
“Jodie are you alright?” Nicky asked as she sat still wrapped up on the kitchen chair.
“Yeah, just a little tied up at the moment,” she answered forcing a small smile on her tear-covered face. “Thank God Elizabeth is okay.”
As Nick cut the tape enveloping Joann’s body with a piece of fractured glass from the floor, he looked around the room and memorized the scene: the broken lamp with splinters all over, Steven Clinton’s large, limp frame covered in blood lying in the center of the room, Tom DeBoer wounded sitting next to the dead body and looking pale, the dismembered oak door leading into the dreadful place, and the sound of police radios, sirens, and yelling in the background. Could we ever stay here again? Nicky wondered.
Epilogue
The feeling of being home brought with it a subliminal sense of security and peace. The whole Brennan family somehow, in spite of what had happened, felt well rested, serene and refreshed when they finally got into the dwelling they knew so very well. The house in New York was familiar, cozy and comfortable. Nick suddenly noticed and appreciated things he hadn’t before: how the big fireplace with its mantel was set off against the dark paneling; the beautiful view through the kitchen window looking out into a yard whose trees were maturing and providing more cover.
The place neither carried nor stored any bad memories. It had never been the scene of violence, and in Nick’s mind it never would. Joann and Elizabeth couldn’t look or roam about its many rooms and replay in their minds the madness and death that occurred in only a few short minutes in their small mansion in Great Barrington.
“So, Nicky, what are you going to do?” Joann asked, being a slight bit coy yet earnestly trying to sound objective and not conflicted.
“I don’t know, Jo, I just don’t know.”
Tom DeBoer, sitting on the big couch, thought for a long second and offered his opinion. “Nick, your work with the police helped save lives. Your work with the federal government saved many others. To start a law practice now would be a letdown for you and the others you work with in the FBI.”
“I know, Tommy, but what about the family? Will they harbor an endless feeling—a perpetual fear, real or imagined—one that says the next crisis must be on its way, you know, right around the corner?”
Carol DeBoer, at first standing and staring down at her feet with her hands on her hips and then pacing, looked over at both Jodie and Nick. “We sit here today knowing a whole bunch of kids weren’t slaughtered by a terrorist who had baffled his pursuers except for you, Nick. We also know that if you hadn’t persevered, the city would’ve been littered with bodies. You and Tom stopped yet another madman bent on murder. It is what you do, it is what are. The law can wait. Go back to work.”
“Nick,” Joann said with a bit of resignation, “a small law practice with regular hours and interesting work sounds so tempting. You could pick and choose your cases and provide great service. But in my heart I know you belong in the intelligence service. It is where you started in the Army so many years ago. It is what you did successfully with the cops and it is what you do now. We will be fine. Go back to work.”
****
Nick took the week off and spent his time jogging, cooking, driving Elizabeth to school, talking to Michael about college, sitting in the big backyard and having long conversations, occasionally lubricated by good wine, with Jodie. Nick yearned to go back to 290 Broadway, but he felt self-centered. Finally, Joann’s head and heart began to come together and her honesty was disarming.
“Nick, it is Friday. On Monday you will be expected back at work. You are going to be given awards and you are going to make your children and me so proud.”
“I know Jo, but I’m just not sure. The medals aren’t important. You and the kids are. I feel like I’m leaving you all behind to do what I want to do.”
“Look, Nicky, what you do isn’t just for you, it is for us too.” Joann’s eyes filling with tears, she continued, “You told me one time you wanted to be a lawyer to pursue justice because it was a noble endeavor, and it was once, but what you do now is a noble endeavor.”
****
On Monday, Team 1 assembled in the SCIF as usual. Sitting around the new smallish and just delivered dark conference table, the group was upbeat and optimistic. OS Brennan had added a quality to the squad that they realized had sometimes been missing before his arrival. Nicholas Brennan had brought distinction to their competent team, and for that they were collectively beaming.
“Nick,” Jack Mason said, “welcome back. I speak for the whole team when I say thank God you, Joann and Elizabeth are okay, and God bless your former partner for his courageous and quick thinking action in Massachusetts.”
“Thanks, Jack. That means a lot. Tommy did a great job.”
“Let me also say we hope you enjoyed your vacation. You certainly earned it.”
“Thank you, Jack, thank you everyone.”
“Nick, I would also like to add a few comments on behalf of all of us with regard to our terrori
sm investigation. Last week we critiqued the Bhiren al Mohammed mission and we studied all of your contributions and success.”
“Jack, most of what I did was luck, and without John Planner, Tom Carrillo, Joann, and a great team like you guys I couldn’t have done anything.”
“Nick, you retrained us on the need for critical thinking, you showed this team that risk taking and creativity in analysis is required, that group think was contrary to ultimate success. You showed a willingness to suffer embarrassment, even failure, and learn from it. You showed intellectual and physical courage. You restored our commitment to determination as a team.”
“Please don’t make more of it than it was. I did my job and got lucky,” Nick said modestly. And then added to lighten the mood, “By the way, if anyone is considering a stroll through the Montague Tunnel, I suggest a good pair of galoshes. The road bed gets a little sloppy. And watch your ass—the trains go by at breakneck speed!” Smiling, he got up, turned, and left the room.
Nick left the meeting feeling a bit down. He knew that much of what he had done actually was based on luck and timing. He was getting some undeserved credit. He also knew that the next terrorist operators would be better because of what they had learned from the Bhiren al Mohammed attack and all the published reports flying across the Internet and the media. Were secrets an old-fashioned notion? Nick wondered.
As Brennan went into his cubicle, he looked for a long moment at the black computer monitor and thought, what a difference technology has made. Then suddenly the secure telephone with its hollow ring rattled on his desk. “OS Brennan, can I help you?”
“Nick, it’s me, Johnny. We just got some intercepted traffic with a humint confirmation from the CIA. A walk-in from Somalia in an embassy near the horn of Africa claims there is a terrorist plot to take out a long security line at a New York area airport. You are going to get a cable in a few minutes.”
“Thanks, Planner. Any chance this is just a hoax?”
“Not unless the CIA director’s office has decided to do standup comedy, Nicky boy!”
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue